Just how bad will the Covid economic hit be? Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’
Yet some responses to today’s figures reveal a worrying degree of optimism about the future. The projections of a V-shaped recovery – quick downturn followed by sharp upturn – published by financial and monetary heavy hitters look as though they may have been too generous. If the UK was slow into lockdown, it’s coming out at a snail’s pace.
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