The US economy will contract by 2.8% this year. The administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was poor, allowing the illness to spread quickly. In addition, just as the economic risks related to Covid-19 began to mount, the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut oil production collapsed, sending oil prices tumbling. The combination of the coronavirus epidemic, and the slump in global oil prices, means that investment will contract sharply this year, especially in the energy sector, and export growth will sag. This puts Donald Trump’s re-election bid at risk, as unemployment looks set to rise sharply.

That last sentence is the conventional wisdom. It is what the global elites and Democrat Party are hoping for out of this pandemic, which is why their propaganda and hype are completely aligned. Here are a couple of other paragraphs from the article:

The impact on China’s economy of the Covid-19 outbreak is set to be much deeper than that of SARS. Assuming that the virus does not flare up again, we expect China’s real GDP growth to stand at only 1% in 2020, compared with an estimated 6.1% in 2019. The slowdown will be concentrated in the first quarter of the year and will still be felt in the second quarter. Growth will recover in the second half of the year when China typically produces most of its GDP.

The eurozone will be one of the hardest hit regions, posting a full-year recession of 5.9%. Germany (-6.8%), France (-5%), and Italy (-7%) will register full-year recessions. In Germany, the huge manufacturing sector is highly export-oriented, which means that the country is particularly exposed to both supply chain disruption and weak global demand. As a result, the recovery that we are expecting in other eurozone countries in the second half of 2020 will materialise much more slowly in Germany.

Funny how The Economist claims that China will achieve a 1% growth rate. Well, maybe not so funny, as they were caught pushing ChiCom propaganda by The Washington Free Beacon:

The Economist is running Chinese propaganda from an outlet that is violating U.S. law to spread the message that Chinese president Xi Jinping has done a masterful job handling the coronavirus pandemic.

The propaganda advertorials, which are ads designed to look like news stories, come from the Beijing Review, an entity backed by the Chinese Communist Party. The outlet has never registered with the Department of Justice as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and does not include a legally required disclaimer that the ad is being pushed by a foreign nation.

Beijing Review is an English-language weekly magazine published by the China International Publishing Group, China’s largest foreign publishing company that is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The magazine, which claims to have a circulation of more than 70,000 per issue, has published advertorials in the Economist since at least 2018, according to the Economist‘s own reporting.

The Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks aren’t economists. Communist China has an export economy. To whom will they export if the rest of the world is in recession? To whom will they export as the rest of the world realizes that the ChiComs are responsible for the crashing of their economies? I don’t think the ChiComs will purchase anybody’s gratitude through their charm offensive, including sprinkling around some “medical supplies” to countries devastated by the Chinese plague (and then bragging to the world about it like their state-controlled media do daily).

The likelihood that the ChiComs have “contained” the virus is nil, given their lies and prevarications up to this point about the origins of the virus. They have kicked out Western journalists, so who is going to do the independent reporting required to verify the ChiComs’ claims? We know they have lied about the virus; why should we believe what they say now?

And I am skeptical about anything The Economist says about Communist China, too. They like their renminbi and have no problem spreading ChiCom propaganda.

The end.