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1. These are seasonally adjusted numbers. The unadjusted numbers are smaller.
2. The article does not account for the $60b in loan sales (unadjusted) to nonbanks the week of 3/22.
Lending definitely tightened up the week ending 3/22, but not to the extent the article suggests
It's interesting that many of us here are programmers and understand that debugging becomes exponentially more difficult as you add a number of variables beyond 1 to your deductive tests. Yet when it comes to the economy, which is the product of an unfathomable number of variables, from the same people there are consistently these confident assessments of why we see x, y, z and what will happen. It's worth discussing…
Right, but it's still possible to understand and debug incredibly complex programs, in the end it's still deterministic. The problem with economics is that it's a social science, and that humans are non deterministic in their behavior. Not even seasoned economists can predict an outcome, the best they can do is understand what happened after the fact.
One part we also fail to consider is that there is a feedback loop between all the individuals in society and any large economic levers that get pulled. This along with all the complicated interactions that are a result of the specific imperfect set of information each individual has makes this problem next to impossible to fully model. At best we could have approximations and models that abstract that complexity away. We approach something similar to the N-body problem in physics, which on some level I'd argue is simpler even as we have specific equations government their behavior. Not so the case for humans and their "internal" decision making process.