One example I would bring out that should make people hesitate before advancing too far down the road of endless stimulus is to recall what happened to the economy in the 1970s. We suffered a major shock from the OPEC oil price increase. Even as the supply side was being dampened, we tried to stimulate demand. What we ended up with was the worst of both worlds, what's called stagflation, with both high rates of inflation and unemployment.
The current situation seems to have some analogies to that. Clearly, the supply side of the economy is taking a hit. We want to minimize the loss of productive capacity, but clearly, some firms are not going to make it through this. Productivity rates are going to be dampened. There's going to be a shock to the supply side. The risk is that if we overstimulate demand, we're going to be putting more demands on the economy than it's going to be able to produce and the end result is going to be inflation.
I've already seen examples of that in my local supermarket. I was quite surprised this week: they're rationing us to one bag of potatoes and the price of meat has doubled since last week because they can't get workers in the meat plant. We're not running out of cows and pigs, but we're running out of production capacity.
Those are some of the examples I would point to as to how, particularly when you're going through a period where you're destroying production capacity, that can have particularly nasty effects on the economy.