Global Economic Crisis

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released its report on GDP growth for Q 1 of 2020. The numbers were dismal, negative 4.8 percent. Though this was the worst decline experienced by the American economy since 2008, at the height of the Global Financial crisis, it was merely a harbinger of much worse to come. It must be recognized that the impact of the demand destruction inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic only began to emerge in the last two weeks of Q1.

A more telling pointer of whist to expect in Q2 was the latest jobless claims report issued by the U.S. Labor Department. According  to the report, an additional  3.8 million American workers filed unemployment claims. Cumulatively, this means that during the past 6-weeks more than  30 million U.S. workers have filed jobless claims. In other words, over a period of only six weeks, the U.S. unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 3.5 percent to more than 18 percent. This is an unprecedented rate of accelerated employment contraction. Not even during the Great Depression has the American economy witnessed such appalling statistics.

The collapse of the job market in the United States brings with it a radical contraction in aggregate demand. This would point to the Q2 report showing that, at a minimum, the nation’s GDP will  shrink by more than 20 percent, and possibly as high as 40 percent.

The collapse of the world’s largest economy at unprecedented velocity is only a reflection of a global economic implosion. The Global Economic Crisis will linger after the health crisis  created by the coronavirus has receded. This is indeed the Great Depression of the 21st century.

In a startling forecast published in Project Syndicate entitled, “The Coming Greater Depression of the 1920s,” NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini outlines ten negative trends that ensure the inevitability of a full-fledge economic depression sometime during the current decade. Professor Roubini achieved notoriety for predicting with uncanny accuracy the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09.

Roubini points out that even prior to the coronavirus pandemic there were downside trends involving structural issues left over from the financial crisis of 2007-09, coupled with deglobalization and the balkanization of supply chains, decoupling between China and the United States and other geopolitical rivalries, and environmental factors  such as climate change. What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is accelerate and magnify those negative trends, which already  have created a perfect storm, leading to a “greater depression” later on in the present decade.

The current economic crisis created by the coronavirus will bring about a severe, U shaped recession, which moist economists now believe will exceed the 2007-09 Global Financial Crisis in  severity. There will be no V shaped recovery, in Roubini’s view. The most chilling aspect of Professor Roubini’s forecast is that even if the COVID-19 enabled recession eventually has a U-shaped recovery, it will only be temporary, with a 21st century Great Depression to follow in its wake, making the 1920s  a time of Global Economic Crisis, with prospects of recovery being differed until the 1930s, all predicated on new technologies and the emergence of more competent political leadership.

The demand destruction created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the collapse of oil prices, and the decimation of the energy industry. No better example illustrates this than the April 20 data for next month’s delivery, in which prices went to zero per barrel and even negative, with WTI (West Texas Intermediate) going to minus $30 per barrel. This surreal price discovery was brought about by a combination of demand destruction in the economy, combined with a lack of storage capacity for oil, leading to producers paying consumers to take their oil.

The implosion in oil prices has occurred in spite of the truce in the oil price war recklessly unleashed by Russia and Saudi Arabia right at the beginning of major global recession. The cut in production by three million barrels a day by OPEC and Russia is statistically insignificant, given that the coronavirus has shuttered much of the world’s economy, leading to a fall in consumption of more than 20 million barrels per day.

The hope that  oil prices may recover latter this years is based on a flimsy premise that there will be an economic recovery by year’s end. This looks increasingly unlikely, and the probability of a second wave of Covid-19 will continue to depress industrial and transportation activity that typically consume most oil production. Short of a war in the Middle East that would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices are likely to remain depressed for the foreseeable future, crippling much of the energy industry and confronting a multitude of oil producers, especially shale oil companies in the United States, with increasingly inevitable bankruptcy.

What is occurring in the  energy sector is a reflection and indication that the Global Economic Crisis unleashed by Covid-19 will not only exceed the financial crisis of 2007-09 in its severity; it is increasingly likely to rival the Great Depression of the 1930s in its ruinous impact.

The IMF has issued a chilling forecast in its just released 2020 World Economic Outlook. According to the report, the world will experience its sharpest downturn in economic activity since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Though the report is projecting a modest recovery in 2021, this is sheer guesswork, as nobody has any idea of the future progression of the health crisis precipitated by the coronavirus.

Dire news emerged from the world’s largest economy in the wake of the sobering IMF report. The Census Bureau reported that retail sales in the United States fell by a staggering 8.7 % in March; this was the steepest decline since the Census Bureau began tracking this data in 1992.

On April 16 the U.S. Labor Department issued its weekly jobless claims report , more than 5.2 million American workers filed new unemployment claims. In a period of only 3-weeks, more than 22 million workers joined the ranks of the unemployed. This eliminates all the employment gains in the American economy over the past decade. And this all occurred in only three-weeks.

Economic and employment data from many other economies, developed and emerging, was equally dismal. This all validates the growing consensus among economists that the global economic crisis created by the unprecedented demand and employment destruction sparked by the covid-19 pandemic will be far worse than the global financial crisis of 2007-08, and may very well rival the Great Depression of the 1930s in its severity.

In its editorial of April 14, 2020, which The New York Times entitled “The Global Coronavirus Crisis Is Poised to Get Much, Much Worse,” it was pointed out that while Covid-19 is currently ravaging primarily the wealthier nations of the northern hemisphere, it will soon strike the impoverished nations of the Third World.

In its editorial, The New York Times states the following:

What probably lies ahead is the spread of the coronavirus through countries ravaged by conflict, through packed refugee camps  and detention centers in places like Syria or Bangladesh, through teeming cities like Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro or Monrovia, where social distancing is impossible and government is not trusted, through countries without the fiscal capacity or health services to mount a viable response.

That would be disastrous not only for them but also for the rest of the world as supplies of raw materials are disrupted, fragile economies collapse, strongmen grow stronger and the virus doubles back to reinfect northern regions.

This is a nightmare scenario, but one not only plausible, but actually highly probable. The form of the human misery that will afflict poorer nations in this next phase of the Covid-19 pandemic will worsen the global economic crisis that has been unleashed by the coronavirus.

Should the pandemic lead to a collapse of medical systems and economies throughout the Third World, a likely result will be an unprecedented wave of Covid-19 refugees seeking perceived safer havens of developed economies, which themselves will be ill-prepared for the consequences of such radical population movements. This will further exacerbate-and lengthen- the extent and severity of what is both a massive global health crisis and increasingly a devastating global economic tsunami.

The U.S. Labor Department just released its weekly number of jobless claims, and in a mocking twist of painful irony, the figures were an exact match for the previous week: 6.6. million additional jobless applications. This means that over the past three weeks, 16 million Americans have filed unemployment claims, adding another 10 percent to the unemployment rate in the United States, which now stands at just under 14%.

Never in history, not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, has there been such a rapid rise in unemployment. The collapse of the job market in the U.S. has been replicated in virtually every advanced economy. This means that the health crisis created by policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic has now unleashed a destructive global economic crisis of unparalleled dimensions. And this is only the beginning. In the weeks ahead, the economic news will only get worse.

Such a swift collapse in employment numbers mean two simultaneous tsunamis of economic doom have been unleashed: an unprecedented rate of demand destruction, combined with an implosion in governmental revenues across the globe. The latter trend, at a time of increasingly vast deficit spending by sovereigns, will in due course unleash another wave of economic calamity; a sovereign debt crisis.

Never before in human history has a public health crisis created in its wake such economic calamity, resulting in the Global Economic Crisis of 2020.

In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, the 96-year old former Secretary of State, Henry Kissing, issued a dire warning on the long-term ruinous impact of the global economic crisis unleashed by the covid-19 pandemic. There was an urgency in Kissinger’s message , in which he stressed the need for a rapid development of a vaccine for coronavirus, and that the monumental effort needed cannot be done by the United Sates alone; international cooperation will be essential.

The global economic crisis created by the pandemic must be dealt with or, in the words of Kissinger, “Failure could set the world on fire, ” condemning generations to economic doom. In addition, shortcomings revealed in governmental responses to the coronavirus pandemic have undermined public confidence in public institutions, and this must be urgently addressed to protect the liberal world order.

The tone of Kissinger’s piece in the Wall Street Journal was dire, being an urgent for far-reaching action to avoid a much greater human calamity.

The U.S. Labor Department released this morning its weekly report on jobless claims. The data shows last week’s record-setting 3.3 million claims has doubled this week to more than 6.6. million. This number exceeds not only the global financial crisis of 2007-09, but even the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the rapidity of job destruction.

The coronavirus pandemic has now unleashed a severe global economic crisis of catastrophic proportions. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning. With a vaccine at least a year, and more likely 18 months , away from development and production, the entire planet is the grips of not only a massive health crisis, but a virtual meltdown of economic activity.

As the pace of jobs destruction accelerates, demand is also being annihilated, compounding the depth and pace of economic contraction. Undoubtedly, this will also generate a severe financial shock globally, as equities collapse, bond spreads widen and sovereign and corporate debt insolvency rampages with destructive ferocity.

As the coronavirus ravages our planet, decimating economies large and small in its wake, it distinguishes itself from the 2007-09 global financial crisis in this way: it is an economic disaster brought on by a health crisis, as opposed to the GFC, where economies were harmed by a major financial crisis. However, this distinction will soon vanish, for the following reasons.

The enforced shutdown of the global economy created by the health response to the Covid-19 panic has led to massive spikes in unemployment, at a faster pace than even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while businesses large and small are shuttered, severely constricting activity, while households are on the verge of insolvency. To prevent complete economic and societal collapse, sovereigns have launched emergency stimulus measures, at unprecedented levels of deficit spending, typically in the range of 10 to 15 % of GDP, as in the United States with Congress recently passing a 2 trillion dollar stimulus bill (representing ten percent of pre-crisis GDP).

However, with millions of workers now jobless and corporate activity at a near standstill, tax revenue from personal and corporate income, as well as capital gains, will shrink precipitously.

Before the onset of the coronavirus crisis, the U.S. economy, supposedly operating at its best level of performance, and with unemployment at a record low, was still requiring an annual budget deficit of one trillion dollars to fund federal government operating costs. Factoring everything we now know, the actual U.S. government deficit for the current fiscal year will be substantially higher than 20 %.

Should large developed economies such as the United States run annual deficits in the range of 20 percent of a shrinking GDP, notwithstanding debt monetization by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, a sovereign debt crisis of unparalleled dimensions will complement the Covid-19 pandemic in its negative impact on the global economy, and endure long after a vaccine is developed for coronavirus.

The increasingly likely sovereign debt crisis makes it more certain that the global economic crisis will not only be long-lasting, but will manifest the characteristics of an economic depression as opposed to a less virulent recession. Furthermore, long-term monetary measures a sovereign debt crisis will compel policymakers to implement will heighten the risk of severe global inflation, leading to a period of prolonged stagflation.