Unlike the Great Financial Crisis, the CoronaVirus Crisis has resulted in a call for leadership to provide transparency.  Why?

Dov Seidman provided the answer

Great leaders understand that when so many vulnerable and scared people are so willing, so quickly, to put their livelihoods and even their lives in their leaders’ hands, and make sacrifices asked of them, they expect the truth and nothing but the truth in return. Leaders who trust people with the truth are trusted more in return. But you better not betray my trust — by not telling me the truth — when I have literally put my life in your hands.

The leaders we will remember from this crisis are those who put more shared truth into our world, not muddied it. And those who put more trust into our world and not eroded it.

In my view, trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug. Whenever there is more trust in a company, country or community, good things happen.

Nothing focuses your attention as a threat to your life.

Please note, in both crises our leadership chose to lie to us rather than tell the truth.

Why?

First, telling the truth takes courage.  It really is hard to tell people what you know, admit what you don’t know and describe what you are going to do to find answers to what you don’t know.

Second, as I documented with the Great Financial Crisis, our leaders thought and continue to think telling us the truth would make the current crisis worse.  They channel their inner Colonel Jessup character from A Few Good Men conviction  “you can’t handle the truth.”

Unfortunately, their dishonesty makes the situation worse.

In the case of the CoronaVirus Crisis, by worse I mean both in terms of lives lost and dollars spent.  To date, in the US, we have seen more than 40,000 Americans die and almost $2.5 trillion in spending by just the Federal government (note: this worst result also applies to many EU countries and the UK).

And where are we now?

We have an economy that is shutdown with no credible way to reopen with people who don’t want to risk their lives sheltering in place.

Why is there no credible way to reopen the economy?

Our leadership lied to us.  They doubled down on this lying by pursuing policies designed specifically for preventing anyone from finding the answers to what the leaders didn’t know.  Specifically, we don’t have adequate testing today because the Administration didn’t want anyone to know how many people had the virus.

As a result, the process for reopening the economy is going to be far, far slower than it should be and the damage will be exponentially larger than it should ever have been.