* * * Thank you to the Institute of International Finance, for the opportunity to speak today. It has been eight months since COVID-19 appeared in the US and the attendant containment measures began to have severe effects on the U.S. economy and financial system (the “COVID event”).
While the economy is recovering faster than we originally expected, and the financial sector returned pretty quickly to stable functioning— in significant part due to strong action from governments and central banks around the world—the shock of the COVID event was by many measures the strongest in recorded history, and for a while in the spring the outcome was—as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo—"a damn, close-run thing."