Billionaire bond investor Jeffrey Gundlach believes a quick economic recovery is "highly optimistic" — and probably not even plausible given that a rebound to pre-coronavirus levels will take at least a year to materialize.

The market’s powerful surge from its March lows has been propelled in part by investor expectations of a rapid “V-shaped” rebound, especially as coronavirus lockdowns get eased. However, Gundlach told Yahoo Finance in an interview that scenario is unlikely for a number of reasons.

"I think that whatever the consensus is on the so-called shape of the recovery, I'm taking the under," the CEO of $135 billion DoubleLine Capital, said on Wednesday.

According to Gundlach, a sharp recovery from a steep, depression-like plunge "basically implies is that you can take 20% of the entire workforce...[and] put them on unemployment benefits, have them produce nothing,” the investor said, referring to the staggering post-lockdown job losses. To date, nearly 50 million people have filed jobless claims in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

Gundlach also took aim at ultra-accommodative monetary policy, saying those workers are basically receiving money “that's being lent by the Federal Reserve to buy the bonds, and that you could do that and nothing bad happens, and nobody gets hurt.”

He added: “That doesn't seem very likely to me that you can have that type of hardship roll over the economy, and it’s like nothing happened.”

Angst over employment

The 60-year-old bond investor also believes there isn't an appreciation of "the fear that's been instilled in people's psyches" from the economic disruption. Although job creation has now logged two consecutive months of record gains, the damage has been deep and lasting.

With the $600 per week federal boost in unemployment benefits from the CARES Act expected to roll off on July 31, it could create "economic angst" and create a "major jolt" to the psyche of out-of-work Americans, Gundlach added.

While the bulk of these job losses hit lower-income households the hardest, Gundlach reiterated his belief that "another wave" of layoffs loom for white-collar workers.

People in the $100,000 to $150,000 bracket “might be at risk also in another wave of layoffs because those people don't really have any savings by and large. But also, the government's unlikely, I think, to come to the rescue for those types of people quite as readily as they did for people who are living more paycheck to paycheck in a real literal kind of sense," he added.

If that were to happen, one of the consequences is that it would be push down wages, as there will be fewer job openings when companies downsize. Meanwhile, widespread work-from-home protocols are raising additional questions about manpower and employee productivity.