WASHINGTON (AP) — The International Monetary Fund foresees a steep fall in international growth this year as the global economy struggles to recover from the pandemic-induced recession, its worst collapse in nearly a century.
Can’t “like” this story. That’s an enormous, enormous drop, and really unpleasantly distributed. And in large part due to the stupid.
It should also make us think about the blathering forecasts that responding to climate change will cost some small fraction of global product. Those numbers are uniformly dwarfed by the kinds of catastrophes we inflict on ourselves.
(One minor note, though: disasters like this also break most economic measuring tools, because dollars and human welfare are only loosely coupled.)
If only…
How many of these projections have baked in the incompetence of current congressional leadership?
“Preventing further policy setbacks,” the IMF said, “will require that policy support is not prematurely withdrawn.”
Translation: Our predictions are based on countries not shooting themselves in the foot.
So we can expect the IMF’s US prediction to worsen should the GOP retain any form of veto power in 2021.