Joe Davis
9/3/2020
Vanguard's Chief Economist
TheAmerican mathematician Claude Shannon famously established a lower bound forthe number of possible moves in a typical chess match: around 10120. That’s 10with 119 zeroes after it. Reflecting on when the COVID-19 crisis began tounfold across the globe, I think the Shannon number adequately captures thebreadth of possible economic outcomes at the time.