Economists Are Losing Hope in a ‘V-Shaped’ Post-Virus Recovery
April 1, 2020 by Ben Holland
The coronavirus is guaranteed to throw the world into recession, but economists are becoming less convinced about the potential for a strong snapback in growth.
The base case for forecasters is that a recovery, perhaps even a vigorous one, gets under way in the second half of 2020. But as the pandemic spreads through Europe and the Americas, and the wide range of knock-on effects comes into clearer view, caveats to that call are piling up.
Underlying all of them is the simple fact that economic outcomes hinge on something that’s beyond the professional competence of most economists to forecast: the trajectory of the disease itself.
“We have no certainty the virus will be gone by the end of the second quarter,” said Nobel prizewinner Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York. If it “lasts through the summer, then all the effects will be amplified.”
Click HERE to read the full story via ThinkAdvisor