Numlock Sunday: Ben Casselman on the worst quarter ever

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Ben Casselman, who wrote the front page story about last week’s GDP numbers for The New York Times. Here's what I wrote about it:

U.S. gross domestic product fell to $17.2 trillion in the second quarter of 2020, a 9.5 percent drop and $1.8 trillion decline. That period covers the April, May and June period that saw enormous swathes of the country shut down and people remaining in their homes in many places. That’s the largest drop on record, with the only comparable events being the Great Depression and post-World War II demobilization, both of which precede the use of modern economic stats. For comparison, during the Great Recession GDP fell 4 percent total, and over the course of 18 months.

I have been waiting for the chance to have my friend and f…