Gary Cohn Discusses Reopening the US Economy

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: But let me ask you first to react to the president saying that he wants to reopen the economy, you heard him says with a big bang, hopefully soon. May 1st is their target. You heard what Fauci said and Krugman said. What do you think about a May 1st target?

GARY COHN, FORMER CHIEF ECONOMIC ADVISER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: Christiane, first of all, thank you for having me. Look, I don’t think there’s a big bang here. I think we have to approach this as a very incremental approach. First of all, we’ve got to make sure we can test, and testing is the key. Once we start reopening the economy, we’re going to have to make sure that we can test people and test people quite aggressively. Because the minute we start seeing early signs of infection, we’re going to want to make sure we can capture that and capture that early so we don’t get a respreads or a reinfection of the whole economy and have to shut it down again. I think that’s imperative. Next, we’re going to have to be very incremental about the way we reopen the economy. A small store in a neighborhood with one or two employees that has one or two customers in the shop at a time, they are going to take one approach. A large company that has 20,000 people coming in its building riding elevators up and down, they’re going to have to take a completely different approach. They’re going to have to segment their workforces, where certain people come in on a Monday in the morning, certain people Monday in the afternoon and a different crew comes in Tuesday morning and Tuesday afternoon and then the Monday crowd repeats on Wednesday so they make sure that their workforce is safe and if some of the workforce gets sick, they’re not cross contaminating the rest of their workforce. I think this is going to be very incremental the way we open up our economy.