IMF New Baseline is -3% GDP in 2020 But World Could Go to -6% or Worse

The IMF has a baseline scenario of -3% world GDP. There is extreme uncertainty around the duration and intensity of the health crisis. They also explore alternative, more adverse scenarios. The pandemic may not recede in the second half of this year, leading to longer durations of containment, worsening financial conditions, and further breakdowns of global supply chains. This would mean the global GDP would fall even further. It could fall an additional 3 percent in 2020 if the pandemic is more protracted in 2020. If the pandemic continues into 2021, the world GDP may fall in 2021 by an additional 8 percent compared to the baseline scenario.

SOURCES: IMF
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

14 thoughts on “IMF New Baseline is -3% GDP in 2020 But World Could Go to -6% or Worse”

  1. Or maybe it was Peter Zeihan.
    He is always going on about Japan being resurgent in Asia.
    (Though he also predicted Russia reconquering Eastern Europe by 2019, so his predictions must be interpreted as tendencies and pressures, not actual facts.)

  2. I believe you’re thinking of another old white man: George Friedman. Ray Kurzweil is more of a technology prognosticator.

  3. Interesting thought. Didn’t Kurzweil predict a re-emergent Japan in the latter half of the century…. where is that damn book ….

  4. China dominated world? Please explain HOW that is going to happen. Make as long a post as you need.

  5. I think you’ll find that the U.S. just needs an excuse to break the trade system. It has just about everything it needs close to home. Those things that don’t have a local supply chain soon will (like medical supplies).

  6. These numbers are absolute crap. The IMF has almost as much credibility as WHO when it comes to reporting on the Chinese.

  7. The Trade system was already breaking. We have re-shored 5 million jobs from Asia back to North America in the last 4 years. China was going to fracture anyway. This just ensures that it will happen faster.

    Japan will return to the position of the big kid on the block in Asia.

  8. Does it matter? It’s only a few percent contraction. Every other contraction in modern times wasn’t the end of the world, wasn’t even a problem for the majority.

  9. If true, the tilt toward a China dominated world and India as a balancing act is already complete. Our only hope is that enough western values has infiltrated China to have social progress globally resume at a due time.

  10. Starting to see the silver lining of robotics implementation, the viruses they could catch are “non-pandemic”.

  11. Well, without widespread access to testing for the virus we have three choices. They are mutually exclusive.
    1) Lock everything down the way China did, much more draconian than what we are doing.
    2) Open the economy and let the virus run the remainder of its course. This is going to fill A LOT of body bags with elderly, disproportionately men.
    3) Keep doing what we are doing until the virus burns itself out enough to not overwhelm our medical services.

  12. I think the numbers presented here are very optimistic. A better bet would be that this virus breaks the trade system. That implies a lot of mayhem and strife.

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