The International Monetary Fund has reported in its forecasts an improvement in GDP in all developed economies except Spain.
In previous posts, we had analyzed how this same organization had predicted that Spain’s GDP would plummet by 12.8%, being the biggest collapse in the entire Eurozone.
On the other hand, the IMF predicts that Spain will have a growth of 7.2% in 2021. However, the fall in 2020 will be so large that not even the rebound in 2021 will be able to compensate for it, so, as a final result, we will have a GDP below 6% in 2019.
Spain is under the effects of morphine. We still have active ERTES, which help our families to get through this crisis situation, the ICO guarantees, and the pending aid from the European Restructuring Fund.
However, there will be a point at which the ERTES will have to come to an end, causing hundreds of thousands of layoffs, the ICO guarantees will cease to be granted so easily, and the European aid is still an unknown, both in terms of its volume and the date of its acquisition.
Moreover, unemployment (which this year stands at 16.8% of the active population) will not increase in 2021 despite the substantial increase in GDP.
If we analyze our public debt, they forecast that by the end of this year it will reach a level of 123% of GDP.
As we can see, expectations are not positive. We will have a very complicated situation, where millions of families will be suffocated, in addition, by the new taxation that the government intends to impose.
The losses generated by companies and the political situation in which we find ourselves do not help either to increase the labor supply or to maintain an internal economic balance that will help to promote investment in our country.
On the other hand, if we look at the macroeconomic environment, the only economy that will grow this year will be the Chinese economy, with an increase of 1.9%, and for 2021 a growth of 8.2% is expected (quite ironic, due to the country of origin of the current pandemic).
The fund’s chief economist, Gina Gopinath, reminded us that the magnitude of the global collapse in the 2008 financial crisis was 0.1%, while the same percentage in the current crisis represents 4.4%. In other words, the coronavirus will have an impact on the world economy 44 times greater than that of the 2008 crisis.
As an additional item, the global debt has come to equal for the first time in history the entire real size of the world economy.
And if, despite all this macroeconomic data, we still think that an asymmetric V recovery awaits us, I recommend you to play the lottery, as the latter may be much more likely.
