General idea
After eleven years of economic profits, the world’s leading potential economy, the United States, has seen its GDP fall by 5% due to the effects of the coronavirus.
US Trend
The United States had an unimaginable positive trend, the longest lasting profit in its history, slow but sustained, reaching a labour market at full employment, with an unemployment rate of less than 4%, controlled inflation of around 2% and a GDP growth of 2%. In other words, data unimaginable for the vast majority of countries.
The economic slowdown of 2009 bore the name of Lehman Brothers. This one, on the other hand, bears the name of COVID-19, a health crisis that has shattered all the outlines of expected US economic growth, just when Donald Trump intends to stay in office as president in the November elections.
The worst is yet to come, and for this second half of the year, due to the generalised confinement, the collapse of GDP could even reach 40%, with unemployment levels of around 20% (more than 40 million people signed up for unemployment benefits, so the number of unemployed could be even higher), so it could become one of the darkest periods of this great nation.
We could analyse what the effects would be if a second outbreak of COVID-19 were to occur in the autumn, but… I think we all have a pretty good idea of what it could mean for global health and the global economy.
