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Let's review some history. During the 2008 financial crisis, the lumber industry was among the worst-hit. The disaster was centered in the housing market, and the immediate effect was a collapse in home construction and residential investment (the primary consumers of wood, along with paper producers). Many lumber companies went belly-up, and those that remained were forced to slash their costs to the bone.
But what happened next was worse. President Obama's Recovery Act was probably less than half the size of what would have been needed to fix the economy, and by early 2010 he pivoted to austerity to cut the budget deficit. That meant very high unemployment in November 2010, a sweeping Republican victory in the midterms that month, and the end of any prospect of further stimulus until 2016 when Donald Trump took office. Even with a quasi-stimulus in the form of tax cuts for the rich in 2017, the economy remained weak all the way up until the pandemic struck.
The result of these choices was a prolonged depression in housing construction. After 2008, residential investment as a share of the economy plunged to the lowest level recorded since 1947, and recovered with grinding slowness — only returning to the level of the previous record low in mid-2014. So not only did the lumber industry take a massive hit, it did not experience any kind of rebound in demand for over a decade.
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