How do we get the economy back to normal? “Extremely cautiously,” says Economist editor in chief
How do we get the economy back to normal? “Extremely cautiously,” says Economist editor in chief
President Donald Trump and the federal government have set the framework for how the U.S. might get back to work as a nation after a season of sheltering in place.
How have countries around the world handled such a task? Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist, has the global perspective.
“Everybody is thinking about it,” she told “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio. “But most of the world is still incredibly susceptible to a second wave of the virus. Most people haven’t been exposed to this virus.”
The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Zanny Minton Beddoes: I think the economy has been put, effectively, into a medically induced coma, and so how do you bring the economy out of it? And you do it as you do with patients, extremely cautiously. The reason we’re thinking about this already is because we’re seeing the alarming cost of the lockdown, economic cost of the lockdown, which is huge, but it’s also going to get a lot bigger very fast. And I was very struck this week with the International Monetary Fund’s forecasts, where they already say that we, this year, are going to see the biggest downturn since the Great Depression, 3% shrinking of global GDP. But that is predicated on economies opening up. If, however, the lockdown continues into the third quarter of this year, they expect the size of that downtime to double to 6%.
David Brancaccio: Can we learn from strategies in other countries? Germany’s already thinking very specifically about ways to get workers back.
Minton Beddoes: We can. I mean, everybody is thinking about it. But most of the world is still incredibly susceptible to a second wave of the virus. Most people haven’t been exposed to this virus. And, I suspect, governments will be reaching different positions on three different parameters, and that’s going to affect it. And the first, and I think by far the most important, is the ability to test, because the only way that you’re going to know whether you’ve got a resurgence in the rate of infections is by having huge amounts of testing. But the second is really, really effective ways of contact tracing, so that once you test and you find someone who has been exposed to the virus, you can actually then trace all the people that they have been in touch with. And then the third sort of set of parameters is, what do you actually ease first? You know, do you open schools first? Do you allow shops to open?
Brancaccio: I suppose another question is what we reopen to. It’s not just going to be the old way of doing things.
Minton Beddoes: That’s exactly right. And it’s not going to get back to normal until we have a vaccine or an effective treatment that is very widespread. And that’s going to be a year, or 18 months, or longer. It’s a normal, I think, of wearing masks in public. It’s a normal where restaurants, if they are open, have tables set much further apart. It’s a normal where factories are reconfigured so that people on assembly lines are far apart from each other. And if you look at what’s going on in the Chinese economy, although it has come back dramatically from where it was, it’s operating, perhaps, at 90% capacity, which is still a dramatic downturn relative to where the Chinese economy was. And so I think we’re not going to go back to anything like what we had, you know, even six weeks ago in the short term.
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