How will the U. S. Economy and People fare through coronavirus?

Wally Smith:

And folks, we have entered this crisis as a country in so much stronger of a position than we did the last crisis that we entered. I cannot imagine if this had hit us four years ago. And this isn’t making a political statement, but there are so many more people working, there is so much more wealth that was started that was in people’s pockets going into this, this absolutely hard times.

And we encourage everybody, if you have… We have a favorite little Vietnamese restaurant that we patronize here and we’re trying to go in there twice a week instead of once every other week. Rich, I’m sure you have some favorite places that you go down there in Scottsdale. It’s our job to keep those places going if we want them to survive, shop local, shop with a local business when you can do that, patronize them and be generous. Tip well, these people are trying to make ends meet. We’re Americans, we rise to the challenge.

I read a beautiful report, I’d be happy to send it out to anybody who wants to see it. It was from a money management company, a very large one it’s called Dimensional Funds, and they had a piece that they showed from each deep recession, the fast recession, how long it took and where we were a year later, three years later, five years later. This is a new challenge for us as a country, this virus, and it’s actually, I think, going to have some tremendous upsides. It’s going to show people that they can break from the rat race a little bit, it’s bringing families together. Families spending a whole lot more time together now that they’re stuck in or that they have this stay at home order. In a lot of cases that’s good and in some cases it’s a little more stressful.

There are all these consequences, but I can tell you we’re Americans and we work hard and we know how to persevere, how to get through things. And I have every confidence based on history and based on knowing the character of our people that we’ll get through this just fine, but we’ve got to be able to look out for each other and take care of each other.